Longmont dispatcher coaches couple through baby girl's birth

LONGMONT -- A police and fire dispatcher helped coach a Longmont couple over the telephone through the home birth of their baby girl late Monday night.

"That baby's cry was probably the most beautiful thing I've heard at work," Micala Rankin, a 41/2-year veteran of the city's emergency dispatch unit, said Tuesday.

Kelly Hendricks was "right on her due date" husband Joseph Hendricks said Wednesday. But she went into labor before he could drive her to the hospital, and he called 911 shortly before midnight Monday.

"She was ready," Joseph Hendricks said, and the girl, who they've named Annabell, wasn't about to wait to be born.

It wasn't their first childbirth, Joseph said, although "we weren't planning on it" to happen at home, "that's for sure."

Joseph and Kelly hold their baby, Annabell, at Longmont United Hospital on Wednesday. Kelly Hendricks was right on her due date husband Joseph Hendricks said Wednesday. But she went into labor before he could drive her to the hospital, and he called 911 shortly before midnight Monday.
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Greg Lindstrom
)

Said Kelly: "It was a very different experience from our first."

The Hendricks' son Tyler was born almost two years ago at Longmont United Hospital. Tyler was waiting in the family car in the garage of their home at 1806 Clover Creek Drive for this trip to LUH while -- as it turned out -- his parents were upstairs overseeing his sister's entry into the world.

"It felt like forever between when I called" the emergency dispatch number "and when she came out," Joseph Hendricks said, although Rankin said it actually only took about seven minutes.

Longmont Fire Lt. Jeff Moll credited Rankin with keeping the girl's father calm while instructing the parents how to proceed before firefighters and paramedics got to the couple's southwest Longmont home.

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Rankin said she advised the parents with instructions about such things as tying off the umbilical cord -- which Joseph Hendricks said he did with a shoestring -- and wrapping the baby in something warm after it was born.

Joseph Hendricks said he didn't actually hear all those instructions. Kelly Hendricks at one point assured Rankin -- and Rankin's fellow dispatchers, who were listening in on a speaker-phone connection -- that the baby was breathing, and that the father was saying about his newborn daughter: "She's so beautiful. She's so beautiful."

"The dad did an amazing job," Rankin said. "I think they're fabulous parents. They did a great job. They brought their baby into the world all by themselves."

"So did she," Joseph Hendricks said of Rankin. "It helped to have somebody to talk to to know what was going on."

Rankin was able to apply the training she and other Longmont dispatchers have in talking callers through such emergency medical procedures until police, fire or ambulance personnel can get there. She said she completed a refresher course in those procedures just three weeks ago.

Moll said that by the time firefighters and an ambulance crew arrived, "everything was fine. The baby was crying and very, very healthy."

Joseph Hendricks, an engineer who works at the Gunbarrel branch of Covidien, a medical devices company, said Kelly and Annabell were expected to be discharged from Longmont United today.

Rankin herself has a baby due in about six more weeks and said her Monday night experience "gave me a little insight as to what I'm getting into."